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Introduction

Villa-Lobos spent the last months of 1936 researching Amerindian and early Hispanic music, in preparation for composing the incidental score for a feature film, The Discovery of Brazil. This was one of many motion pictures made by government institutions at the time, glorifying the cultural and historic heritage of Brazil. This particular film told in just one hour of the Portuguese expedition under Cabral in 1500, the discovery of a beautiful new land, and of the first contact with the natives. Villa-Lobos went to considerable trouble with musical authenticity (as far as the erratic state of Brazilian musicology at the time would allow him), constructing his own melodies in similar vein to the chants of Brazilian indians, and imitating ancient Portuguese and Spanish secular and ecclesiastical music. The film’s musical and visual climax was the ‘First Mass in Brazil’, an impressive tableau in which the Portuguese sailors and crew cleverly sing Mass against the frighteningly juxtaposed incantations of the newly found Amerindians: a true clash and coming together of cultures, emphasizing the multi-racial traits which characterize Brazil even today, and which the Vargas government took great pains to harness as a symbolic means of national unity. Villa-Lobos’s ‘discovery’ of Papae Marcelli, and the evocation of a sixteenth-century Mass in a new, Brazilian context in this film score prompted him almost simultaneously to write his own a cappella Mass between December 1936 and January 1937, specifically for the Orfeão de Professores. It was entitled Missa São Sebastião, St Sebastian being the patron saint of Rio de Janeiro. An augmented Orfeão de Professores gave the first performance at Rio’s Teatro Municipal on 13 November 1937, in a grand concert held to mark the close of the secondary school academic year.

Amongst Villa-Lobos’s papers there exists a manuscript of several recitative fragments headed ‘Introits da missa São Sebastião’. It is not quite clear how these were intended to be used, and they are omitted in the present recording, but their texts provide important subtitles for each section of the Mass. Just as movements in the Bachianas brasileiras mostly take dual titles, one ‘Bachian’, the other ‘Brazilian’, so the Mass movements are given patriotic identities in addition to their liturgical ones: ‘Kyrie—Sebastian! The Virtuous’, ‘Gloria—Sebastian! The Roman Soldier’, ‘Credo—Sebastian! Defender of the Church’, ‘Sanctus—Sebastian! The Martyr’, ‘Benedictus—Sebastian! The Saint’, ‘Agnus Dei—Sebastian! Protector of Brazil’.

The Mass is composed for three voices a cappella, but Villa-Lobos gives a seasoned and practical musician’s variety of performing options: women’s voices, boys’ voices, or men’s voices, with each possibly doubled at the octave. The self-consciously archaic three-part polyphony (which emulates Palestrina and Victoria), the modal inflexions of the vocal lines, and the austere simplicity of the whole work stand in stark contrast to the opulent style usually thought typical of Villa-Lobos, as demonstrated in the huge orchestral and choral frescos of jungle and city life, the Choros, which he wrote during the 1920s. In the Mass, raw nationalism gives way to an idealized and serene view of the powerful Catholic heritage of his country. Subtle glances at the chants of macumba (as at ‘et sepultus est’ in the Credo) are, however, reminders that in Brazil even the rites of Roman Catholicism have been (and still are) tinged with elements from the magical beliefs transported to Brazil by the millions of black slaves brought over the Atlantic by the colonists so many centuries ago. With Portuguese respectability came also African magic, and as food offerings to the old African gods of macumba and other cults are left alongside statuettes of St Mary and St George in Brazilian roadside shrines or in rocky clefts on the beach, so St Cecilia and St Sebastian embrace the whole of Villa-Lobos’s vision of multi-cultural Brazil, in the form of oration and liturgy. The Missa São Sebastião stands unique and radiantly beautiful in Villa-Lobos’s huge output.

Glory to God in the highest
and on earth peace to men of good will.
We praise you. We bless you.
We adore you. We glorify you.
We give you thanks for your great glory.
Lord God, heavenly king, God the Father almighty,
Lord, the only-begotten Son, Jesus Christ,
Lord God, Lamb of God, Son of the Father,
you who take away the sins of the world, have mercy on us;
you who take away the sins of the world, receive our prayer;
you who sit at the right hand of the Father, have mercy on us.
For you only are holy. You only are Lord, Jesus Christ.
With the Holy Spirit, in the glory of God the Father. Amen.

I believe in one God, Father almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
of all things visible and invisible.
And in one Lord Jesus Christ,
the only-begotten Son of God,
born of the Father before all ages,
God from God, light from light,
true God from true God,
begotten not made, consubstantial with the Father,
by whom all things were made.
Who for us men, and for our salvation,
came down from heaven,
and was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the virgin Mary,
and was made man.
He was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate,
he died and was buried.
And on the third day he rose again according to the scriptures.
And ascended into heaven:
he sits at the right hand of the Father.
And he shall come again with glory
to judge the living and the dead:
there will be no end to his kingdom.
And in the Holy Spirit, Lord and giver of life:
who comes from the Father and the Son,
who with the Father and the Son together is adored
and glorified; who spoke through the prophets.
And in one holy, catholic and apostolic church.
I confess one baptism for the remission of sins.
And I await the resurrection of the dead. Amen.